Category: Studio

We’re just on a roll this year. When first met Keith he was just starting his first season on 30 Rock. He had a killer idea for a cartoon that could be made for nickels. Normally we pride ourselves to make the best, high-quality animation possible. Keith convinced us to make the crappiest animation we had ever done. But you know what? It became charming. So here it is. Keith Powell’s Nate & Abe. It has one of the best casts we have ever seen for a cartoon like, David Wain, Robert Ben Garant, Alyssa Milano, Rachel Dratch, Aubrey Plaza, and John Lutz just to name a few.

We are premiering a 22 minute episode at the New York Television Festival, which is the frickin place to premier a new pilot. Nate & Abe is about best friends and high school freshmen who are desperate to ‘branch out’ from the insular world they’ve known their entire lives and explore their differences. But when the road to diversity is paved with perverted principals, racist parents, Mandingo porn, gay bullies, and obnoxiously large-breasted cheerleaders, Nate and Abe begin to realize that the bond that connects them is greater than the ones that divide them. Here, watch a clip:

Winning awards too. We won best short at Scream Fest in Los Angles, the biggest horror festival on the west coast… maybe the world. It definitely is the biggest horror industry event out there. Lots of fake blood too.

Here’s a pic of über producer Jen Luk hoisting the 728 lb golden skull award for our 2.5D animated film POSTHUMAN. That’s also how she deals with slacking animators too, just lifts them by the neck for a good throttling. Look for Jen & Cole on tour with the film as it plows through the festival circuit. We play Australia next mate.

Back in 2005, Humouring the Fates Inc. agreed to create a special treat for Tampa’s runaway hit anime convention MetroCon. In honor of their big-name guest, Lupin III creator “Monkey Punch“, we threw our resources into creating a short work of original animation that would begin the opening ceremonies of the convention. We here at Fates are big Lupin fans, and we really wanted to created something that would excite the fans and show our love. I think we did allright. Check out the full short after the jump, and let us know what you think.Continue reading “Lupin III”

This was a rejected sequence for a bit of software coming from a software company in Japan (who are creators of, not coincidentally, Jam Sessions DS, another game in which some artwork of mine appears) called (I think) Bilingua, and it’s intended to help people learn a new language. Essentially we did a whole mess of various animations for various verbs, and the software plays the animation in conjunction with the words in order to help the user associate new words with visual terms. Hey, not everything an animator does is hot action excitement.

This one I rather liked, partly because we were able to design the animation with a grand total of about five drawings, not including the way the text itself is being “written”, which isn’t a series of frames so much as it is one drawing (the text line) which is gradually revealed frame by frame to create the illusion of being produced by the hand and pencil. The whole text block then shifts upward and the cycle begins anew.

This one is a bit unusual, in that it’s not a sequence from the narrative. This is, instead, a small piece of animation that appears in the opening sequence. It will likely be used as a masking element, though in what capacity I’m not sure… I just draws ’em, I don’t makes ’em up (sometimes).

I enjoy animating silhouettes ’cause they’re a lot easier than full character work… you can hide murder in that negative space. Ultimately it becomes a matter of just following the lines, but in fact the initial rough animation for this contained a full (if incredibly scribbly) character. It wasn’t until the cleanup phase that it became a complete silhouette.

This is the older Humouring the Fates demo reel from 2006 era. We think it was released in Jan 2007. We’d like to thank all the animators who helped make the work found in this collection. We’d also like to extend a warm “thank you” to all the clients who paid their bills. Hopefully we’ll be able to release the 2008 reel sometime before 2013…

This is our new endeavor to try and reach out to that outside world a little more and interact with our art as we make it. Which just boils down to: we’ll have to talk about our work more… show updates of things as they happen. That kinda crap. So here is the place where we share the riotous joy that is making cartoons. Our plan is to show you some of the insider making-of art, stories, gripes, and a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to make animation. One frame at a time…